“I think the Greens have a fundamental contradiction. They advocate degrowth without saying so. . . . But if you want degrowth, if you want agro-ecology, there’d have to be one or two million more farmers in France over the next twenty years. It’d be the equivalent of the rural exodus of the 1950s, but the other way around.” Speaking on Fox-style French talk station CNews, panelist Eugénié Bastié didn’t think the Greens were serious about cutting emissions — because they don’t want it to upset other left-wing causes.
For these self-styled progressives, short working hours and access to easy urban living count most. A degrowther transformation of French agriculture, Bastié insisted, would “be the end of the thirty-five-hour week and holidays and mean forcing people to go out into the fields.” Fellow panelist Alain Jakubowicz wondered if a good comparison might be “Pol Pot.”
Bastié, a prominent pundit for right-wing daily Le Figaro, is often heard denouncing Greens who care more about “wokeness” than “preserving nature.” They may throw around “anti-capitalist confetti,” she says, but they embrace a model of work and welfare that was built on France’s postwar economic growth, known as the “Thirty Glory Years,” and mass consumerism. When the left-wing New Popular Front, also including the Greens, ran for last summer’s parliamentary election promising that climate action and the fight to defend French workers’ pensions were the “same struggle,” Bastié mocked the idea. “The fight against global warming will necessarily involve a reduction in purchasing power and an erosion of social rights: it’s better to be honest and say so,” she tweeted. For her, the choice between “degrowth” and…
Auteur: David Broder
